O-n-e L-e-t-t-e-r A-t A T-i-m-e

While Recovering From A Stroke, A Pembroke Pines Man Decided To Write A Novel. It Took Him Nine Years, Typing . . .

May 23, 1996|By KATHLEEN KERNICKY and Staff Writer

Bill Hirsch woke up in the middle of the night, pain piercing his back. He couldn't talk. He couldn't move. Hirsch doesn't remember paramedics reviving him during the ride to the hospital. He doesn't remember when his heart stopped beating for 16 seconds, doing a slow dance with death. Unable to talk or even turn himself, he communicated with wife Jeri by blinking his eyes. He had suffered a massive stroke.

The day had started like any other. Bill and Jeri went to work at their fabric store in Queens. They came home, "had a nice dinner and a glass of wine" and watched television. They went to bed.

"Just that day, we were at work and I remember him jumping up on the cutting table," Jeri Hirsch says. "I thought to myself how agile he was. He went to sleep fine. He awoke in the middle of the night...and he wasn't breathing."

It was December 10, 1974, a date Bill calls his "second birthday."The stroke forced him to start over again. To learn to walk and learn to talk and return to the basics. When people ask his age, he jokes that he's 21. - - -

Two decades later, Hirsch has finished his first book, 450 typed pages titled Ms. President. The heroine, Grace Kellner, is the first woman president of the United States.

At 81, using a wheelchair and speaking with a slight slur, Hirsch harbors no illusion of literary ascent. He keeps a stack of rejection letters from publishers and agents who are politely uninterested in his work.

His desire to write was born of a test of survival, a light out of the dark depression that followed the stroke.

"You're going along day to day, humdrum, and all of sudden this happens," Hirsch says from his bright and comfortable living room at Century Village in Pembroke Pines. "It made me realize that life is fragile. You live for the moment and make the most of it."

After the stroke, Jeri Hirsch hoped a move to Florida would lift Bill's spirits. In the mid '70s, they sold their fabric business and home in Queens, N.Y., and moved to a condominium in North Miami Beach. They moved to Century Village nine years ago.

In North Miami Beach, some of their neighbors asked Jeri if she would serve on the condominium's board of directors, a job she didn't want. "Let me know if you have an opening for an empress," she joked.

"I thought `Ms. President' would be a good title for a book," Bill says. "I sat down and started to write. I have a terrific imagination."

Bill started writing in longhand. But his handwriting was so poor from the lost dexterity in his hands, he couldn't read his own words. So he started typing. Sitting at their kitchen table, he typed with his right forefinger on an old Smith-Corona.

"When it would be painful, I would use another finger because I didn't want to lose my train of thought," he says. "I'd try not to skip a day. I'd write a least a line every day. I was competing with myself."

Nine years later, he finished.

"It was a labor of love," says Jeri, his wife of 50 years. "Everyone needs a reason to get up in the morning. This gave him a purpose."

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Bill was the fifth son of Harry and Lily Hirsch. His father was a house painter and a craftsman in the Bronx. As teen-agers, Bill and his brothers sold newspapers outside the Forum theater. What they earned was turned over to Lily.

A "macho man," Hirsch taught swimming and worked as a lifeguard in the Catskills resorts. With his dark good looks and muscular build, young Bill resembles Errol Flynn in the old black-and-white photographs that hang in the couple's den.

In January 1942, Bill enlisted in the Army. He was on Army furlough in the Catskills in the summer of 1944 when he met Jeri. "She fell in love with the uniform," he says.

"I thought he was a general," she says.

They were newlyweds when Bill was sent to Nazi-occupied Germany toward the end of the war. He penned her love letters. She was waiting in New York when he came home.

"We stood on Fifth Avenue and kissed and kissed and kissed in the pouring rain," Bill says, smiling at the memory. Later, they opened a business and had a son, Larry, who suffered from childhood polio. Now 45, Larry and his wife and Bill and Jeri's two granddaughters live in Indiana.

Since the stroke, Bill has returned to the hospital about 10 times. At least four times, doctors told Jeri that he wouldn't survive.

One time was 10 years ago, when the couple vacationed at Warm Mineral Springs on Florida's west coast.

During the trip, Bill suffered a heart attack and came down with pneumonia. Doctors in Venice, Fla., told Jeri to call their son. She began to cry.